On Feathers and Reminiscence by Isilme_among_the_stars  

“Who is Fingon?” Elros asks me as his mischievous little fingers flit between the cake batter and his mouth. Absent-mindedly, he makes irritating sucking noises as he licks them clean. I slap his hand away distractedly and counter his question with one of my own. I know better than to take his curiosity at face value by now.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because Atto calls his name in his sleep. Fingon is a he, right?”

“He was our cousin.”

“Was?” Elros questions, entirely too perceptive. “People can’t just stop being cousins, can they?”

“Like too many of our friends and family, he is long since gone.”

“Gone where?”

The innocent obliviousness of the boy is beguiling. I wish I could bottle and save it, eternal and perfect, and gift it back to him as an inoculation against the open-eyed world-weariness that must later come. He is not a stranger to death, but I cannot bring myself to draw his gaze toward it again in this moment.

“Never you mind. Somewhere we cannot reach him. That is all you need know.”

Elros, seemingly satisfied for now, dips his finger into my batter again. I hold up the wooden spoon like a baton, straining against amusement to put on my best disapproving face. The threat to paddle him is an empty one and Elros knows it. He's as clever as he is mischievous, that boy. He giggles and skitters away. I’m sure I haven’t heard the last of this.

The days are growing hotter, and I take the boys paddling in the brook on sultry afternoons. This time, the question comes from Elrond when I least expect it, put up to it by his brother no doubt.

“What was cousin Fingon like?” he asks, all innocence and dripping hair as he pushes himself up out of the water to sit on the bank beside me.

“Why do you ask?”

Even with guileless Elrond, I am not fool enough to let down my guard.

“Because Atto was crying when he whispered his name last night. I do not think he knew I was awake.”

“Fingon was brave and kind,” I say. “Atto and I miss him very much.”

“Well, of course. Anyone would miss a cousin who was brave and kind,” he says, matter-of-factly, before slipping back into the water.

These twins! Their curiosity will be the undoing of me.

Tonight, the lingering heat has driven us outside to sleep under the stars. Elros sets my hammock swinging as he climbs in, woken by half-muffled panicked noises that hang in the still air. Maedhros already comforts Elrond, whose night terrors have grown in intensity with the summer heat. It has been this way as long as we have had them. Elrond responds far better to my brother when he is afraid, and Elros seeks me out. I try to quell my annoyance at the sweaty heat coming from the boy-shaped radiator curling up by my side.

“Do you know the reed bed song?” Elros asks sleepily.

“No. You will have to teach me,” I reply, keeping my voice soft and low.

He yawns, then lifts his sweet little voice hesitantly in song.

Softly the rushes sigh,

Cool winds blow in the night

My hands will weave them true

Making a place for you

Soft, cool your reedy bed

Gently here lay your head

Sleep soundly as you may

Rest ‘til the dawning of day.

“It’s beautiful,” I remark, smoothing damp hair off his forehead. “Where did you learn it?”

Elros snuggles in a little closer. “Naneth used to sing it to me, when I couldn’t sleep.”

“And to Elrond too?”

“Elrond too. Can you sing to me?”

He looks up, grey eyes glinting in the moonlight. Night has transformed my mischievous hellion into a solemn little thing as it often does, far younger and more vulnerable than he appears during the day. How can I refuse? To my ear, it does not sound nearly so sweet rendered by my deeper voice.

“Do you miss her very much?” I ask quietly afterwards.

“Very, very much,” he confirms, shivering from a memory I cannot touch. “It was hot when she died. She was brave and strong too, like Fingon. Maybe they are friends, in Mandos.”

I know Elros is quite aware that Elwing is dead. It had not taken long for Maedhros and I to realise the twins had witnessed her fall. Still, I am taken by surprise by the connection of these two truths spilling so easily from an eight-year-olds lips. I wonder when he realised that was where Fingon had gone. I am certain Maedhros has not spoken of it, just as I am certain he can hear every word. If he were capable of doing so, his breath would not quietly catch with stifled sobs as it does now.

“Yes, she was,” I agree, swallowing a hot lump in my throat that threatens to give way to weeping. “Does the song help?”

I feel the little nod against my side. Curiously, Elros does not shed a single tear, he who is usually so prone to squalls of emotion that are as violent as they are blessedly brief.

“Is that why Atto keeps a feather in his pocket, and twirls it in his fingers sometimes? To feel better about Fingon?”

“Yes,” I agree simply. I see no point in withholding honesty when the boy has peered so insightfully into my brother’s grief. Perhaps he can do so because his own griefs take a similar enough shape. Perhaps it will give him some small solace to know there is comfort for the both of them.

“But why a feather?”

“Because Fingon once flew to rescue him carried by a great eagle. He became quite famous for it. And after that Fingon would wear feathers in his hair sometimes.”

I smile through the sadness, remembering that little detail. Many still spoke of the gold ribbons he liked to weave into his hair. They have notably made it into every history our cousin has appeared in so far. Few still fondly recalled the feathers.

“That seems….” Elros frowns, searching for the word he wanted, “…big-headed, to go about with a reminder to everyone why they should praise you stuck in your hair.”

“Ah, but that’s not why Fingon did it.”

“Why, then?”

“Because it made Maedhros laugh. He joked once, after that flight, that they’d be pulling bits of Eagle out of their hair for the rest of their days. So Fingon decided to make sure it became true.”

“I think I like Fingon,” Elros decides.

“Yes, I think you would have,” I agree.

As the solstice approaches old wounds bleed afresh. At this time each year memories of the battle of unnumbered tears crowd too close. Our twin boys, I realise, are facing their own noisy ghosts. A grim mist settles over the four of us, leaving nothing untouched, and leaches the colour from everything it alights on. In short, we grow increasingly miserable, and none of the usual cures can lessen our collective suffering. Maedhros takes to brooding over open books. He keeps forgetting to turn the pages to fool us into thinking he is reading, but none of us are taken in by that particular deception anyway. Elrond begins to look as sheet-white during the day as he does at night and an entire week passes without requiring a single disciplinary action for Elros. Of the three, Elros is the most likely to talk. I join him as he sits under an elm tree shredding fallen leaves.

“What’s troubling you?”

He shrugs non-committal, not bothering to look up. “Why are you and Atto so sad?”

How can I explain the devastation of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad to an eight-year-old? I simply cannot. But perhaps understanding the events that give rise to grief is not necessary for understanding grief itself.

“Elros, does your body ever seem to remember exactly when a terrible thing happened, and make you feel miserable all over again, without you having to be told that it is almost that time of year once more?”

Elros barely has to think. He leans in close until I can feel his muscles work as he picks off increasingly miniscule scraps of yellowing-green and whispers his confession. Perhaps he is worried I will become angry, for though he seeks closeness, his body is a contained, defensive thing.

“When Naneth died, the sun was setting very late and the first berries were ripe enough to be picked, just as they are now, and I feel bad again.”

I nod. “Do you think of her a lot these days?”

He nods quietly. “I think that’s why Elrond and I are sad. He never says it, but I think he misses Naneth too.”

“Yes, I think so. You can talk about her with me if you’d like to.”

“Okay,” he agrees, burying his face in my shirt and murmuring into my chest, the desiccated leaf abandoned, “but what about you and Atto?”

“It is similar for us. The worst week we have lived through began on Midsummer’s Day. It was many years ago now.”

Words bubble up through muffled sobs as my shirt starts to feel decidedly damp.

“Will I ever stop feeling sad?”

“No,” I answer honestly. “But it does not mean you cannot also be happy. The sadness reminds us of how real the love we had was. That love doesn’t pass away with death; it lives on in us for as long as we live.”

My still, really very little half-elfling clings closer.

“Tell me something about your Naneth,” I encourage Elros gently.

After a while he tells me slowly, “Naneth always held my left hand when we walked anywhere, and Elrond’s right. She told me it was because I was a sturdy little monster and she needed her stronger hand to keep me close, but really it is because Elrond would never let go when she needed to use it for something else. She always dropped my hand instead, and I never ran away.”

“Very practical!” I chuckle and give Elros a quick squeeze.

“Will you tell me something about Fingon?”

Expectant eyes gaze up at me, still red and bright with sorrow. How can I refuse?

“Fingon learned to draw his bow with both his right hand and his left, but his arrows always flew truer when he drew the string left-handed.”

“Like Atto does,” Elros smiles distantly. No doubt he pictures the vague comedy that is Maedhros practicing archery. The bow, which he can only brace against the end of his right wrist under a tensioned string, drops after every firing for lack of a hand, though he catches it with his left more often than not. It would be a funny sight, if you did not know his brows creased not with concentration but discomfort.

“Naneth didn’t know how to use a bow,” Elros adds wistfully after a time.

“And Fingon never learned to successfully wrangle twins,” I reminisce.

It is suspicious, if not entirely unexpected, that Elros sneaks off to his room with rather full pockets before lunch. It is doubly so when Elrond follows, clothing likewise stuffed, moments later. When I find them intently divesting their garments of fistfuls of feathers, I say nothing. Sliding quietly out of the doorway before they see me, I am not sure whether to be concerned about where this is going, or relieved Elrond is doing something other than stare fearfully into the middle distance. In the end, I decide to ignore their escapades and allow the two to continue smuggling their avian contraband. For, with each successful mission their footsteps grow a little lighter and their chins lift a little higher. That is the reason I give when I am being charitable to myself, and it would likely be true if I were the parent I wanted to be this week. In darker moments I admit I could not reign them in if I tried, too consumed and dulled by the regrets that spend their days with one hand on my shoulder. In truth, I cannot even rouse myself to curiosity over their secretive plans.

On the shortest night of the year the twins sleep soundly. Their time-tethered ghosts, slightly out of sync with Maedhros and my own, are beginning to withdraw. They do not stir as I tiptoe past them in the early hours, seeking refuge from troubled dreams. I steal into the woods and join my voice with the Laiquendi who gather to mark the solstice with a chorus to the dawn. The trees shiver with the strange harmonies of green elves; strains that seem borne of the very earth on which I tread. My imperfect rhythms, and falteringly pitched tones are met with quiet acceptance, as is their usual approach to us. Our strange neighbours reckon little of our wars and ways, but regarding us as wayward, long-sundered kin, have welcomed us into the bosom of their rich land. I am glad on this morning for their undemanding companionship. Their strange but beautiful way of seeing the world wraps around me with the song, banishing bitter memories. A lingering sense of the surreal holds me gently as I return home.

Maedhros has not even bothered with the pretense of sleep. He bends over parchment saturated with ink, the candle in his tediously balanced lantern burned very low. Words will not exorcise his demons, no matter how much he tries to use them in this way, writing apologies to the dead in a thousand different forms. I do not read his sentences but mark the dissertation on pain written into the curve of his back and the vacancy in his eyes.

“Come,” I say, sliding the pen gently from his fingers. “You cannot rewrite the past.”

It is not hard to steer him at these times, floating like a ghost ship, at the mercy of the whim of the winds, and just as lifeless. I trail him along behind me, thinking to closet my brother in the safety of his bedchamber until the worst passes. It is then we discover the twins have filled Maedhros’s bed with those feathers. The coverlet is carefully folded back and every exposed skerrick of mattress covered. Downy fluff and sleek vanes of every shade from raven blue to the rust brown of sparrow’s backs compete for purchase. Maedhros slides to his knees, a fistful of the things gathered in his hand and weeps.

How do you explain the Nirnaeth Arnoediad to an eight-year-old? How could they possibly understand the battle still quietly raging over half a century later? How does one tell them that they live amid the ravages of a violent struggle that they can feel but will never see, shaping every aspect of their lives. I cannot, even in song. Maedhros tries.

There are no words sufficient for such things. Instead, when the boys wake and instinctively come to find us, still lost amid a devastation of feathers, he stops trying to pretend to them that he does not bleed. The three of them are an odd puddle of limbs, avian off casts and displaced emotion, tangled together there on the floor.

“There’s a hole somewhere in you,” Elrond says, intense and strange. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“Mm-hmm. But I don’t want it to scare you,” he says carefully, in the softest of voices.

“A Fingon shaped hole,” Elros asserts.

“Part of it is Fingon shaped,” he agrees.

“And you try to fill it with feathers sometimes,” Elrond states seriously. “We wanted to help.”

My brother picks up a blue-tipped specimen, slightly crushed, but still beautiful, and watches its colour shift as it twists in his fingers, bending the light.

“Feathers don’t fill it, but they do still help. There’s a Naneth shaped hole in the both of you,” he says, not looking up.

Elrond frowns, because the hole in him is so central that he has never been able to see it and can only stare in confusion when the shadows of such things are visible in his twin. It is Elros who speaks, because once again, he seems to understand on a level deeper than words.

“You tried to fill it with you and Atya.”

“No,” Maedhros drops the feather and places his cupped hand on each of their cheeks in turn. “
But we are trying to bridge it with kindness.”

“What can fill it then, if not feathers?” Elrond asks, his intelligent mind fixating on the wrong question entirely, determined to find its solution.

I lower myself down beside him, close but not quite touching. Touch from me is rarely welcome at the best of times, let alone when emotions are running high.

“You can’t fill it, Elrond,” I say. “It is more like a cut. With time, and care, perhaps it will slowly knit itself together, but if the hole is big enough there will always be a mark.”

“You will always wonder,” Maedhros adds, “what would Naneth have done if she were here? What would she have said to me? Even with Maglor and I filling the spaces with words of our own.”

Elros tosses fistfuls of feathers into the air. “She would have scolded us. She would have laughed and sat with us watching them fly.”

Elrond giggles as the feathers fall, tickling his face.

“Why did you think it would be scary atto?”

“Aren’t you scared?” Maedhros asks.

“Not now,” Elrond answers.

“But were you, before?” Maedhros prods him.

His silence is answer enough. I study his face as he begins to realise the shadows he jumps at are real. His eyes are like tunnels, as if turned inward to probe some darkness he had just found within himself.

“Do you remember last week, when there was a snake in the bushes?” Maedhros asks, and Elrond nods slowly, still far away.

I remember that day. Maedhros joined us for a swim because Elrond had been having such a bad time that being more than ten paces away from him at any given moment was all that it took to send Elrond spiralling. Elros wheedled, and my brother, soft-hearted with these boys in a way you would not believe had you seen him command a battlefield, caved instantly. Both boys sat laughing upon the grassy bank, trying to catch blackberries in their slippery hands as my brother picked and tossed them. I tried not to cringe at the mess because it was the first time Elrond had smiled all day. Quite suddenly his eyes had gone comically wide, he shot forward and buried himself in my arms. I was baffled for a moment, until Elros backed up, arm raised, and the scaly thing casually slithered out, paused briefly to flick its tongue in the air and went on its way.

“You couldn’t see it, and I don’t think you heard it. How did you know to move away?” Maedhros wants to know.

“Because Elros looked scared.”

“Exactly, so you knew there was something scary behind you right?”

When Elrond nods this time, he follows it by tilting his head toward my brother, intrigued. Elros, by contrast, has started slotting feathers between his toes, but his ears prick up all the same.

“Years ago, beginning Midsummer’s Day, Maglor and I fought in a terrible battle. You knew the hole it left was there because when you looked in my eyes, you saw how it feels to remember it. What you didn’t know was that there’s nothing left to be scared or sad about save memories.”

“And your memories can’t hurt us?” Elros asks, waving a foot in the air so the feathers jiggle about in an absurd juxtaposition to the subject at hand.

“No,” I say with more confidence than I feel, because while they may not be able to do so directly, there are many other ways to cause harm. I glance at Maedhros to find him staring at me with intense determination as if to say we will not let them!

By the time August comes, grief has had its fill of us. I feel chewed up, sucked dry and spat out. Maedhros looks no better. I am supposed to be teaching the boys today, but every lesson I try devolves into avoidance and arguments. When Maedhros walks over, roused by the noise, Elros and I are yelling at each other while Elrond takes refuge in a corner with his hands over his ears.

“Enough, Maglor,” he says with the calm air of authority he wears so effortlessly, even pinched with exhaustion as he is now. I feel the sudden guilt that comes with remembering that I am supposed to be the adult, when I have been acting nearly as childishly as Elros. I walk away, fists gripping bunches of hair at my temples as I try to bring myself back down to the ground.

It is not long before laughter drifts though the air, startling me as curiosity chases away the last vestiges of anger.

“Did he really do that, Atto?” Elros asks.

“Oh yes,” Maedhros reassures him, “and then Celegorm collected two dozen termites and tried to get them to eat Maglor’s lyre.”

“No!” Elrond says incredulously. “They didn’t damage it, did they?”

“Sadly not,” Maedhros laughs, “because Maglor spent the next week practicing as often and as conspicuously close to Celegorm’s ear as possible. I swear he tuned the highest string five cents flat just to torture us.”

“I think I like Celegorm,” Elros decides.

“Maybe you would have before he turned one of his acts of petty revenge upon you. And it was five cents sharp actually,” I wink at him.

Elrond, who startled when I inserted myself into the conversation, slowly relaxes when he realises I am grinning.

“I am sorry I frightened you,” I apologise.

Elrond smiles a pale, brave little smile, shuffles over to press his side against mine, and settles there as if he means to stay. I raise an eyebrow at Maedhros who shrugs as if to say just go with it. Resting a hand very gently on his shoulder, I hope fervently it will not cause him to flee.

“Who would win in a fight between Celegorm and Fingon?” Elros asks.

Maedhros pales for a moment before he answers, and I wonder if it is this painful to talk about our brother and cousin, why he is doing it.

“Oh, Fingon, definitely! But if you wanted to be fed regularly, I would place my bet on Celegorm. Fingon got bored of hunting quickly, but Celegorm was committed. I once saw him stand statue-still in the middle of a stream for an hour to spear a particular kind of fish.”

“I miss the fish we used to have by the sea,” Elrond says quietly to me. "The ones you catch in the river here don’t taste the same.”

“And I miss the way Naneth used to measure both our pieces to exactly the same size because she knew we would fight otherwise,” Elros adds.

“And she used to tell us the green beans on our plates were seaweed for the fish to swim through trying to convince us to eat them,” Elrond grins at his brother. “But it didn’t work.”

“Because the beans were horrible!” Elros agrees.

I suddenly understand what Maedhros has done. Our boys are not only talking about Elwing but do so with a smile on their lips and a twinkle in their eye. None of which would have been possible had Maedhros not given them permission first, by talking about Celegorm and Fingon. Grief needs no invitation to set up residence in your heart, but it often requires permission to speak out. Even weary and fractious, the four of us have managed to share a laugh, and about a topic that would not even have been broached a few short months ago at that. As I sit here amongst my little family, appreciating this small wonder, the future does not seem so very bleak.

“Writing is cancelled for today,” I announce. “Who wants to learn how to shoot like Fingon?”

Elros is on his feet, tugging me toward the door almost before I finish speaking. It is not long before Elrond joins him, small hands pushing me from behind, and I am on my feet, laughing as I try not to step on their toes, stumbling toward the door. Maedhros looks up from where he still sits, the workings of whatever tedious task he is planning to return to already starting to show in his eyes.

“Oh no, master storyteller, don’t think you’re getting out of this one,” I tease, catching his hand with the one I still have free, and pulling him up.

Now Elros is running recklessly forward, turning his head to goad Elrond into hurrying. A hundred different questions and wonderings float about him in the wind: how big is the bow, how hard must I pull, will I slay monsters with it? And Elrond is chasing after, giggling and shrieking as he tries to catch and tackle his brother, calling him the monster when Elros turns again to stick out his tongue.

Beside me, my own brother, his hand still in mine is quietly hopeful. The ghost of a smile lights his pale face as he watches the carefree display of childish delight before us. And something is there in his eyes that I can’t quite name, and old big-brotherly quality that has been missing for some time. It is not something frozen in the past but living and breathing right now in the present.

These boys! They may just be the remaking of us. I step forward into the future, taking my brother with me.

Chapter End Notes

Elwing did not actually die in the Third Kinslaying, but as all the evidence that the characters in this story saw pointed to this outcome, they believe she did. At this point in time Elwing and Eärendil have not yet come to Valinor, there is no Silmaril shining in the sky to suggest otherwise. 

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